Bad examples: The troubled futures of kinship in colonial Spanish America

Bad Examples: The Troubled Futures of Kinship in Colonial Spanish America explores the impact of colonialism on articulations of gender and sexuality in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic Spanish world. It shows that Spanish and indigenous subjects employed discourses of kinship to explain their social pasts and to imagine more favorable political futures. While friars worked to extirpate the perceived idolatries of indigenous and African peoples, the Crown proposed legislation to curtail abuses by Spanish landholders, and Incan elites argued for their legitimate sovereignty over the Spanish-held Andes. Bad Examples argues that kinship sets the terms for these visions of social disorder and their possible transformation. It collates and analyzes an expanded repertoire of kinship paradigms—schemas that colonial administrators perceived as threats to normative family politics—in readings of conquest histories, indigenous texts, literary works, and archival documents from Spain and the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. These colonial actors\u27 mutable theories of generation, inheritance, and descent undermine a scholarly tendency to analyze colonial gender and sexuality as the imposition of oppressive Spanish and Christian norms on New World peoples. To that end, Bad Examples is organized around four concepts of affiliation through which colonial subjects described and negotiated malleable social hierarchies: use, exemplarity, relations, and habits. It gathers these prominent terms from the colonial Spanish Americas to describe not what kinship is, but rather what kinship does. As an historiographic method, Bad Examples returns uncertainty to the archive by taking seriously the struggles of colonial subjects to codify, deploy, and repurpose kinship for diverse political ends. The textual production and emotional labor that went in to these attempts for alternate colonial orders challenge the model of an inevitable future guaranteed by reproductive union.

Bad examples: The troubled futures of kinship in colonial Spanish America

Bad Examples: The Troubled Futures of Kinship in Colonial Spanish America explores the impact of colonialism on articulations of gender and sexuality in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic Spanish world. It shows that Spanish and indigenous subjects employed discourses of kinship to explain their social pasts and to imagine more favorable political futures. While friars worked to extirpate the perceived idolatries of indigenous and African peoples, the Crown proposed legislation to curtail abuses by Spanish landholders, and Incan elites argued for their legitimate sovereignty over the Spanish-held Andes. Bad Examples argues that kinship sets the terms for these visions of social disorder and their possible transformation. It collates and analyzes an expanded repertoire of kinship paradigms—schemas that colonial administrators perceived as threats to normative family politics—in readings of conquest histories, indigenous texts, literary works, and archival documents from Spain and the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. These colonial actors\u27 mutable theories of generation, inheritance, and descent undermine a scholarly tendency to analyze colonial gender and sexuality as the imposition of oppressive Spanish and Christian norms on New World peoples. To that end, Bad Examples is organized around four concepts of affiliation through which colonial subjects described and negotiated malleable social hierarchies: use, exemplarity, relations, and habits. It gathers these prominent terms from the colonial Spanish Americas to describe not what kinship is, but rather what kinship does. As an historiographic method, Bad Examples returns uncertainty to the archive by taking seriously the struggles of colonial subjects to codify, deploy, and repurpose kinship for diverse political ends. The textual production and emotional labor that went in to these attempts for alternate colonial orders challenge the model of an inevitable future guaranteed by reproductive union.

Moved by Pity: Communities of Affect in the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez

This article demonstrates that Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) engages the discourse of pity to create an imperial community. While the article builds on recent scholarship that has emphasized the global context of Ramírez’s travels, it shows that geographical displacement is not the only type of movement in this text. Infortunios also demands that readers be moved on an affective level in order to prove their capacity to feel for an imperial peer. In this regard, it is not geopolitics alone, but also affective transits that determine the boundaries and binds of Spanish empire.Este artículo demuestra que los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora emplea el discurso de la piedad para crear una comunidad imperial. Mientras estudios recientes se han enfocado en el contexto global, el presente artículo ilustra que el movimiento físico no representa el único tipo de desplazamiento en el texto. Infortunios les pide a sus lectores que respondan al sufrimiento de Ramírez y le acompañen en un viaje mediante una relación afectiva. Así, la comunidad imperial construida por Infortunios no solo depende de la geografía, sino también de la fuerza de la piedad